Plantar pressure parameters for dynamic gait stability analysis.

Dynamic stability measurement is necessary to evaluate human performance over a variety of locomotor environments. In this paper, the suitability of parameters extracted from plantar-pressure measurements as input into a dynamic stability model was investigated. FScan in-shoe pressure data were collected from 15 subjects as they completed four successively more unstable walking tasks. Six parameters met the criteria of being reliably calculated from plantar pressure data, increasing as the task became more unstable, and relating to past measures from the literature: anterior/posterior centre of force (CoF) position, medio-lateral CoF position, double support time, stance time, cell triggering frequency, and maximum lateral CoF position. These parameters could be combined to create an index of dynamic gait stability.